James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

He pressed the fingers of one hand against the side of his head, like a man experiencing a pressure band or a level of cerebral pain that gave him no relief. He pulled open the door of his pickup and got inside, holding the steering wheel to steady himself. I walked to the passenger window.

“Where you headed?” I asked.

“To confront the people who cheated me, the ones who put defective wiring in my house, the ones who shouldn’t be on the goddamn planet.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Doc.”

“Stand away from the truck,” he replied. He ground the transmission into gear and swung the truck into traffic, almost hitting an automobile packed with Catholic nuns.

I went back inside and called the dispatcher. Wally happened to be on duty. “You want us to pick up this guy, Dave?” he asked.

I thought about it. Roust Dr. Parks now, in his present state of mind, and we would probably only add to his grief and anger. With luck he would eventually go home or at worst get drunk somewhere, I told myself. “Let it go,” I said.

Helen Soileau called me just after lunch. “How busy are you?” she said.

“What’s up?”

“It’s Dr. Parks. Wally said you called in on him earlier.”

“What about him?”

“Evidently he went looking for Castille LeJeune. He didn’t find him, so he went after this guy Will Guillot.”

“What do you mean ‘he went after him’?”

“With a cut-down double-barrel twelve-gauge.”

“He shot Guillot?” I said.

“You got it backwards. Parks is dead. Say good-bye to our prime suspect in the drive-by daiquiri shooting.”

“Wait a minute. I can’t get this straight. Parks is dead?”

“At least he was five minutes ago. Get pictures if you can,” she said.

When I got to the home of Will Guillot emergency vehicles were still parked along the street and barricades set up to prevent the curious and the voyeuristic from driving past the house. The incongruity of the images there would not fit in time and place. In a tree-covered neighborhood of nineteenth-century homes and thick St. Augustine lawns, where the hydrangeas and impatiens and Confederate roses were softly dented by the breeze, and blue jays and robins sailed in and out of the live oaks, Dr. Parks lay on his side in the driveway, his mouth and eyes locked open, one cheek pressed flat against the cement, a pool of dried blood issuing from a ragged hole in his throat into the sunlight. Six inches from his outstretched hand lay a cut-down twelve-gauge, the stock wood-rasped and sanded into a pistol grip.

The crime-scene investigator was a nervous, tightly wrapped man with a strong cigarette odor by the name of Dale Louviere. When I ducked under the crime-scene tape he glared into my face, as though challenged, nests of green veins pulsing in his temples. Before he had entered law enforcement he had been a gofer and point man for a notorious casino operator in Lake Charles.

“What do you want, Robicheaux?” he said.

“Dr. Parks was part of an Iberia Parish homicide investigation.

Where’s the coroner?” I said.

“Him and the sheriff fish together on Saturday. We’re still waiting on them,” Louviere replied.

“Are there any witnesses?”

“Yeah, the shooter, Will Guillot. He’s in the kitchen.”

“How do you read it?” I asked.

“Open and shut. The vie went nuts about a house fire or a home warranty policy or something. He came here to wax Guillot and instead caught a .45 in the throat. The round hit the oak tree in front.”

I leaned over to look more closely at the cut-down twelve-gauge. I couldn’t see a brand name on it, but the steel around the magazine was incised with delicately engraved images of ducks and geese in flight.

“Handsome gun to chop down with a hacksaw,” I said.

“Get some mud in the barrel and that’s what people do, Robicheaux,” Louviere replied.

“Except this guy was a collector. How many collectors spend their time converting their firearms into illegal weapons?”

“The next time I investigate a homicide, I’ll have the crime scene shipped to Iberia Parish so you can supervise it,” he said.

I walked through the porte cochere to a back door and entered the kitchen without knocking. Will Guillot was at the counter, gazing out the back window into the yard, while he ate a ham-and-lettuce sandwich.

A tall, half-empty glass of milk rested by his sandwich plate. He turned and looked at me quizzically, the birthmark that drained like purple dye from his hairline to the corner of his eye al most obscured by shadow, so that one side of his face looked like the marred half of a large coin.

“You were in fear for your life, were you, Mr. Guillot?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess that describes it,” he answered, one cheek stiff with a piece of bread. “You have jurisdiction here?”

“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Fair enough. On an unrelated subject, are you a hunter or a gun collector?”

“I hunt. Why?”

“No reason. Were you in “Nam?”

“No. What’s that have to do with anything?”

“Dr. Parks was on a medevac. He had his problems, but I don’t think he was a violent man. I don’t think that cut-down twelve on the driveway was his, either.”

“This conversation is over, Mr. Robicheaux, and you can get out of my house.”

“Does it bother you?” I said.

“ Bother me? That I defended myself against a lunatic?”

“His daughter was burned alive after buying liquor illegally at one of Castille LeJeune’s daiquiri shops. His house burned after you put bad wiring in it, and you shot him to death after he came here to complain about a fraudulent home warranty policy you sold him. It’s hard to believe one guy can have that much bad luck, isn’t it? Enjoy your sandwich, Mr. Guillot. I’ll be in touch,” I said.

“Kiss my ass,” he said.

Sunday Father Jimmie had gone to Lafayette to collect signatures on a petition to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and had stayed the night at a retreat house in Grand Coteau. I ate a plate of clam spaghetti at a cafe in Jeanerette, then went to sleep reading T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom , with Snuggs on the foot of the bed. My windows were open and in my sleep I heard the wind in the trees, a solitary pecan husk rattle on the tin roof, a workboat chugging heavily on the bayou. The air was cool and clean smelling with ground fog, rainwater ticking in the trees, and I felt Snuggs walk across my back so he could sniff the breeze blowing through the screen. Just after midnight, my bowels constricted as though I had swallowed a piece of broken glass. I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, my thighs trembling with nausea.

Then I heard someone wedge a tool between the back door and the jamb, splinter the deadbolt, and enter the house. Whoever it was moved quickly toward the band of light at the bottom of the bathroom door, opened it slightly, and looked in at me.

“I wasn’t planning to meet you like this, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity. Can I be getting you anything? You don’t look too well,” the figure said.

“Coll?”

“Right you are. No, don’t get up. Take care of business while I have my say, then I’ll be off.” His hand came through the opening and removed the key from the lock. He shut the door and locked it from the outside.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I said.

I heard him go into the bedroom, then scrape a chair into position.

“This is a fine cat you have here. Been in a few fights, has he?”

“Listen, Coll—”

“He’s got a real pair of bandoliers back there.”

My face was cold with sweat, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach.